particle-dev
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particle-iot-archived
Support flashing over USB
I would love to see the Spark DFU-UTIL package installed by default.
Also, I had DFU UTIL working in 0.0.13. Installed 0.0.14 just now and I'm getting this error (below).. if I delete the ~/.sparkide/ the dfu util is gone and I get other errors trying to search for it in the package manager. If I reinstall it with 0.0.13 and then open 0.0.14 I get this error below... http://i.imgur.com/BLTcH5J.png
I would love to see this too, but we've got to be careful; dfu-util is unfortunately GPL licensed, so we would have to find a way to implement this that would not require that the rest of our software be GPL licensed as well.
dfu-util package can be separate and licensed on GPL and it should be fine if user downloads it by him/herself. But the moment we include it in Spark IDE binary it would infect whole project with GPL.
We could add menu item, which says "Flash via USB..." which checks if dfu-util package is installed and if not, it shows instructions how to install it or does it automatically. First option won't violate GPL but I'm not sure about second option. Would have to consult a lawyer.
There's a user who got caught in this for Windows as he wasn't aware of the driver issue https://community.spark.io/t/spark-dev-ide-feature-request-or-help-finding-it/8137
Should this thread be renamed to something like 'Get flash via USB working in Particle Dev'? Or else it should probably be closed... seems a decision was made and implemented in the code to not install the dfu-util dependencies by default on account of license issues. That covers this issue as described, but the larger issue is that flashing via USB from particle dev doesn't currently work. Even worse... it silently fails without a warning or error message because of this pass through.
In terms of getting that to work, it appears the spark-dfu-util package (hosted in @suda 's account) needs a naming update to 'particle-dev-dfu-util' so the call from the particle-dev package will work correctly. I assume there's more issues than that as spark-dfu-util hasn't been updated in over 2 years now but that's the first obvious one.
Good point Mike! It would be possible to have flashing via USB without dfu-util and use ymodem protocol. I renamed this issue to reflect the nature of the issue better.